The Nether Netherlands

Where do we go from here?

There's a silence surrounding me

I can't seem to think straight

I'll sit in the corner

No one can bother me

I'm at Scheveningen, some four kilometres out of The Hague.  I'm gazing west across the water towards the town of Southwold (home of the Adnams family).  But I can't seem to think straight...

I've just seen a dead parrot, hanging in a church,

But no amount of Monty Python can drive  Pink Floyd out of my mind....

I think I should speak now 

Why won't you talk to me

I can't seem to speak now 

You never talk to me

Which could be because I have just had a near death experience, of sorts.....

I visited the Hotel des Indes, (at Lange Voorhout 54-56, 2514 EG Den Haag, Netherlands, doubles from €169.90 a night) and asked to see the cigar lounge.....  

It was here, on the night of January 23rd 1931, that Anna Pavlova, the inventor of Australia's national cake (but also, coincidentally, my mother's godmother) last asked for her Dying Swan outfit.....

And there, with her favourite swan, Jack, she is!  I see her spirit, lingering in the smoky atmosphere, having just descended the Stairway to Heaven....

My spirit soars.  I feel brushed by the feathers of death....

But I can't show my weakness 

What are you thinking

I sometimes wonder 

What are you feeling

Where do we go from here

And the answer is, perhaps, I would go to church, to sit quietly in a pew having lit a candle, looking up at the vaulting arches, pretending I am a spiritual being.....

But the churches are gesloten..... closed!

Even on Sunday.  

In the beautiful city of Delft there are two major churches - The Oude Kerk, with its leaning tower...

and the Nieuwe Kerk, with its restored 100 metre rocket launcher tower....

And, on a bright Sunday morning, both are firmly closed....  Except that a couple of black-clad close-shaven extremely-pure-looking young (?) men are carrying an electric keyboard into the New Church (which dates from 1381) and I slip in behind them, snaffling a picture of the elegantly rising columns.....,

Peeking towards the last resting places of the Dutch Royal Family, from William the Silent (aka William I, Prince of Orange, assassinated 10th July 1584),  to Queen Wilhelmina (Queen from 1898 to her abdication in 1948: died November 28th 1962)....

But the transporters of electric pianos will have none of it.  We will be having a wonderfully happy clapping service at 12 and a half to which you might be somewhat welcome, but you may not be looking at this building internally at this time, nor resting your spirit, nor quietly meditating the demise of your mother's godmother 88 years ago....  

Out!

(Lord save us from the Evangelicals....!  Release the dogs....!)

It doesn't have to be like this

All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

I have better luck in Gouda, where the central Markt is ripe with cheeses, which the people smoke in clay pipes.  

Here I am allowed into the great St Janskerk,  St John's, which at 123 metres long is the longest church in The Netherlands.    It was built as a Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, but became Protestant after the Reformation.  

The church is part of the Dutch Museum Churches, a collection of religious buildings which bring together the variety of religious heritage in the country's history, from early Catholicism, to Calvinism, back to Catholicism under Spanish rule, then back to Calvinism and the Dutch Reformed Church.....

Not that it was that simple....  In the 1940s the majority (around 100,000) of Dutch Jews were destroyed by the Nazis.  Since then the number of adherents to Islam (5%), Buddhism (2%) and Hinduism (1%) has risen, and the number of Christians has radically declined.  Around 70% of the population of The Netherlands has no religious affiliation, leaving churches closed, or empty.....

(or vulnerable to Evangelism....)

St John's Church in Gouda is remarkable, as it has 72 wonderful stained glass windows - the Gouda Glass - some of which were created by Catholic artists (Dirk and Wouter Crabeth, working between 1555 and 1571) and others which were created post-Reformation (between 1572 and 1603).  

Among the images in these windows there are moments from the lives of Jesus and St John, depictions of Judith slaying Holofernes,   Philip II of Spain and his wife Mary Tudor,  and of the Relief of Leiden in 1574.  

One great window was a gift from the city of Haarlem to commemorate participation in a crusade in 1219....

And The Liberty Window was designed by Charles Eyck to commemorate the Second World War.

My soul flickers in the shadows, a tiny glimmer in the vastness of this building. The great eighteenth century Moreau Organ towers over my head, but it is silent.  

There's a silence surrounding me

I can't seem to think straight

So, swallowing my spirituality, I take refuge in Gouds Beleg on the Nieuwe Markt, and wash some old gouda cheese with cumin down with some Dutch beer. The natives are friendly. Very friendly. Sans prejudice..... I feel welcome....

My kind of church.....

What are you thinking

Where do we go from here

It doesn't have to be like this

All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

 Keep Talking

Pink Floyd

(from the aptly named album 
The Division Bell)

What are you thinking 

We're going nowhere

What are you feeling 

We're going nowhere

Why won't you talk to me

You never talk to me

Dave Gilmour/Polly Samson/Rick Wright

Amsterdam and The Hague - The Netherlands - Part 2 - Golden Age

Musées des Beaux Arts....

My visit to Den Haag (The Hague) is singleminded. I have not come to watch the Dutch Parliament in session; to attend the application of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (CROATIA v. SERBIA) at the International Court of Justice; to visit one of the largest Apple Stores in the oldest shopping arcade in the Netherlands, nor to take a dip off the beach at unpronounceable Scheveningen (apparently this was the word used to get German spies to give themselves away)..... This is a lightning raid on The Mauritshuis, a recently renovated jewel in the crown of the Dutch Golden Age.

Meisje met de parel, Johannes Vermeer, c 1665

As the publicity says, the girl is back in town, and I have a date.....  Her home was designed and built in 1644 by Jacob van Campen, the most famous architect of his time (who also provided Rembrandt with his grand home in Amsterdam). Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679) commissioned it, hence its name, but he was not at home when I called.  

The new main entrance to The Mauritshuis (or you can take the glass lift)

The museum has recently undergone extensive refurbishment and modernisation which provide an airy and bright entrance lobby, as well as extended space for new exhibitions.  But the original interior, even when lit with LED systems which are calibrated to blend daylight with candleglow is as designed in the seventeenth century.  As Laura Cumming wrote in The Observer, the Mauritshuis is the ideal museum.  It's a home from home for art.  The rooms are on a human scale.....  Vermeer's Girl, for all her Mona Lisa fame, is in a modest wood-panelled chamber..... 

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens,
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1615
Primary Art - a teacher and her rat instruct young minds....

It is a place to muse, and to amuse. The Greek origin of the word museum denoted a place or temple dedicated to the Muses. Hence it has come to mean a building set apart for study and the arts. One of the more famous pictures on show here is itself of a lesson - Rembrandt's justly acclaimed The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632).....

Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson: Aris Kindt, armed robber, executed by hanging

As Jonathan Jones commented in The Guardian, the eye is led irresistibly into a dark tunnel between the arm's exposed muscles - and into the body itself. Rembrandt leads the onlooker from the visible world to the invisible darkness within. What lies there?

Self-portrait with Lace Collar, 1629

As Rembrandt himself looks confidently out at the viewing public, I muse on what it is that I am seeing. Why have I come all this way? Jonathan Jones suggests that, the true reason to come here is to encounter some of the world's most profound works of art. Perhaps I should have spent more time in Den Haag, and visited the International Court of Justice. It is fitting perhaps that the Mauritshuis and the Peace Palace are near neighbours. Somehow I feel that Vermeer and Rembrandt still work as ambassadors for peace, and that whatever else we gain from great art the very act of admiring such works is in itself an act of peace:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

But I hasten to Amsterdam.....

And go straight to the also recently refurbished Rijksmuseum, a great palace of art, exhausting in its dimensions and in its scope. 

The Rijksmuseum is the museum of the Netherlands.  It was first opened in 1800 (ironically in Den Haag), but moved to Amsterdam in 1808 and then to its current location in 1885. It has recently been extensively refurbished, and when I was last here, about five years ago, less than half the collection was on view.  

Rembrandt's De Nachtwacht, 1642

Now there is more than enough.  I mean, much more.  From the Middle Ages through the Golden Age, to Dutch Colonialism, to (almost) now.  Guess who I find looking a little uneasy beneath all the pomp and splendour?

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1886-87)

Everywhere there are talking points, pictures to amuse, artefacts, sculptures, allegories, portraits.  Sometimes, I almost feel the models are here to admire themselves....

But what leads me out, takes me from myself here are the pictures of life....  In the Mauritshuis there were wonderful pictures of life, by Jan Steen for example, and here, with David Teniers, in his Peasant Kermis (1665), you get an impression of the world as it is.  I particularly like the complex visions of village activity in winter, like this:

Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, 1608

But I also enjoy the pictures that you could almost walk out into, like this Amsterdam canal scene, though there are fewer cars (or bicycles!) and more leaves on the trees in this picture than now.....

Jan van der Heyden, Amsterdam View with Houses on the Herengracht.... (1670)

And outside, this elegant city is a museum in itself. The canals reflect the buildings and light fills the windows, and the shifting shapes of the narrow-fronted houses bring to mind the world with which de Hooch and Vermeer might have been familiar.

And the waters of the canals, the bridges and boats, cannot have changed that much.....

And the sky, the sense of space and the vanishing points, are still in the air.....

It is not difficult to dream a little in Amsterdam. Musing in the galleries and then wandering one way or another, time hangs lightly draped across your shoulders. The canals seep an atmosphere of quiet. At the Vishuisje Herengracht I have a snack of oysters and a delicious herring broodje (sandwich) and feel that the world is not such a bad place after all.

And in the Cafe Bouwman, close by, I make a new friend (though I understand that felines are no longer allowed in bars by law....)

In the Vondelpark, the willows do not so much weep as relax, their tendrils hair-like in the winter cool....

And on the canals themselves, as dusk gathers, the lights glow warm and welcoming.....

My trip to Amsterdam was not singleminded. I was not only there for the Museum.  Even when ice and snow gather and life slows to winter rhythms....

And over the water sails a boat, just like back then

Though it is cold outside, Peace comes dropping slow in this most picturesque of places.....  And the evening closes with supper with a family of old friends who live overlooking one of the quieter canals. On the third floor of what once was a convent school we eat and drink and discuss the politics of museums, the nature of the Netherlands, and the passing of time. 

Good night, Amsterdam......  Let's drink to another Golden Age!

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood....

W H Auden

Holland - The Netherlands - Part 1

Windmills of the mind.....

Windmills (or rather Wind Turbines) at Enkhuizen haven, the IJsselmeer behind.

Only half the Kingdom of the Netherlands is more than one metre above sea level, and eighteen per cent of its surface area is water. With a population of nearly seventeen million the number of people per square kilometre of land is nearly five hundred, which puts it up close to Bangladesh and South Korea in the population density stakes.....

Low Country: Lelystad from the Houtribdijk

It was not always so.  The Dutch Golden Age, in the 17th century, saw economic growth with the Dutch East and West India Companies creating colonies and trading posts across the globe; settlements included New Amsterdam in North America and the Cape Colony in South Africa; art and science flourished.  But after the boom came something of a bust, and from Napoleon to Hitler, despite being a constitutional monarchy since 1815 and a parliamentary democracy since 1848, the Netherlands have had their share of troubles.

Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with bleaching grounds, 1670 - 1675

The population of The Netherlands has almost quadrupled in the last hundred years, and perhaps this has driven the extraordinary developments in land reclamation and modernisation. Despite the crowded nature of the country, it is one of the world's ten leading exporting countries and food production is its largest industry. Rotterdam is the busiest port in Europe. In addition The Netherlands is the only country which has an action plan to cope with rising sea levels due to global warming. It has a golden past, but is also thinking ahead.

View of Delft, 1660 - 1661, Johannes Vermeer

In the centre of the administrative capital, The Hague, imaginative new buildings dwarf the bars and restaurants around the Plein....

But the great conurbations are all well and good; for the moment I yearn for the sense of space that was caught by those masters of the landscape.  

Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Cottages, 1665

Meindert Hobbema's The Avenue at Middelharnis is one of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery, London, with its extraordinary symmetry and depth.   His pictures teem with life, from people tending their gardens, to riders with their dogs, but all human activity is secondary to the immensity of the sky and the growth of the trees.  Hobbema was apparently a pupil of his friend, Jacob van Ruisdael, but the influence of the latter's uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael is also noticeable in his work.

Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with Ferry, 1649

It must have been comparatively easy to walk out of Amsterdam, or Utrecht, or Leiden, and find views of rural scenes in that Golden Age. Today, apart from urbanisation, there are 139,295 kilometres of roads in the Netherlands, as well as 3,013 kilometres of rail track.  There are said to be nine million cars (and eighteen million bicycles) in the country, so finding a quiet spot is a test of initiative - but it is not impossible.....  

Church and Windmill at Loenen aan de Vecht

With so little variation in topography (the highest point in The Netherlands is little over three hundred metres above sea level) and the absence of true forest (the last original natural woods were felled in 1871) it is not easy to find an interesting landscape. Heathland, meadows, mud flats, farmlands and non-native plantations are the order of the day, but still the great painters of the past created memorable images.....

Landscape with Two Oaks, Jan van Goyen, 1641

And their more modern followers have not done so badly either.....

Lake near Loosdrecht, Willem Roelofs, 1887

Which is not far from where I find this....

Loosdrecht Lakes

And, less conventionally, this....

What has saved the landscape of The Netherlands is the presence of water.  It is everywhere, in one shape or form or another - canal, river, lake, rain, snow, ice..... Reflections of the sky in Leiden brighten the place and also add space and air.....

Elsewhere the shimmering gleam of large expanses of water and sky unite to create a feeling of liberation.....

Though there is little doubt that the addition of a mill, in this case by a one of the great modern Dutch masters, makes for a better composition.....

Oostzijdse Mill along the Gein River, 1903, Piet Mondrian

This has been a fascinating journey, in part beyond my expectations.  Initially I wanted to see where Rembrandt walked, and sketched, but in this I was thwarted by the modern world.  However, the streets of old Leiden where Rembrandt grew up are still quiet and evocative of the past......  Some of the houses like these around the Pieterskerk were where the original Pilgrim Fathers settled, escaping religious persecution in England.  From Leiden some of them, including an ancestor of Barack Obama, set sail on the Speedwell, in July 1620, to meet with the Mayflower in Plymouth before attempting to cross the Atlantic (the Speedwell had to be abandoned in Dartmouth).

In wandering across the IJsselmeer, and driving down toward Utrecht, I also came across another surprise.  A slightly dated Italian TCI guide book mentioned, in a footnote, that the village of Laren contained a small art gallery in the former home of an American couple, William and Anna Singer. Here they had built a villa, which they called Wild Swans, in 1911, and, with inheritance from his father's Pittsburgh steelworks, he started collecting paintings of the Hague School and contemporary Dutch artists.  

I was in for a further surprise, however.  With car parks overflowing and a buzzing crowd in the foyer, I was not to find the works of Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915), who painted the village pond nearby, and his contemporaries....

The Koesweerd Pond, Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig

But a major exhibition dedicated solely to the life and work of Leo Gestel (1881 - 1941) who, together with Piet Mondrian, was one of the most prominent Dutch Modernists.

Gestel spent time in Paris, and in Majorca, Germany, Italy and Flanders, and he experimented with pointillism, fauvism, cubism and futurism (among other -isms!) Several of his works depict Dutch landscapes, some in summery Cezanne-like colour....

Others in monochrome, in keeping with the current season....

But others are portraits, dazzling in their colours....

This was a surprise indeed.  We had come a long way from the Golden Age, and my intention to find and emulate the early masters had come unstuck.  It was time to withdraw, and to rest a while within the warmth and depth of a Dutch interior.  Just down the road, unnervingly on the Brink (which I am relieved to learn means the village green) we found Cafe t' Bonte Paard (The Spotted Horse), where thick pea soup and dark beer smoothed over the wrinkles of post-modernism.  

Meanwhile, out on the IJsselmeer, those windmills are still turning, patiently waiting for the next master.....